


The Ashes

by satellites (brella)



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Dark, F/M, Forgiveness, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-10
Updated: 2012-05-10
Packaged: 2017-10-30 21:38:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/satellites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Sportsmaster kidnaps and tortures Wally for six hours straight, the speedster pulls through with the rampant reassurance that eventually, Artemis and the Team will come and save him. The Team comes – but Artemis doesn’t. Two-shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Antiox](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Antiox), [Caelie](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Caelie).



> Inspired by "Ashes On Your Eyes" by Deb Talan.

**a road you won’t revise**

Wally doesn’t look her in the eye anymore.

In some ways, she’s glad he doesn’t, because she’s not sure that she can face that pale, crawling desolation corroding the edges of them; she’s not sure she can observe the crippling loss of their rambunctiousness, their vigor. Maybe it’s fair, she thinks, that she won’t look at him, either – that she won’t let her wandering eyes rake up over his uncharacteristically quiet face, the freckles almost red against the pallidness of his cheeks.

“He’ll get better,” Batman tells them all, staring at the wall. “In time.”

Artemis doesn’t want to be the one to call Batman a liar.

She never thought she would miss the speedster’s endless, empty chattering or his inflated statements of self-brilliance, but the sound of their absence is so loud that it pries her ribs apart. The sight of him sitting with his knees crooked around the stool and his chin resting behind his arms on the kitchen counter, wordless and deliberately ignorant, is a clawed hand reaching into her gut and twisting it to pieces.

They haven’t spoken a word since he’s been back, since he was dredged off of that distant, grimy warehouse floor with his bones scrambling to pick back together and his blood caked down to the roots of his hair and his jocularity a distant, hissing memory. She can’t bring herself to open her mouth near him. His presence gnaws her words into useless white pulp, and she – like he – says nothing.

She wonders if his dreams are different now – she wonders if the horizons he always scrambles so desperately toward (she can see them, too, thanks to M’gann’s loosened grip on her mind at three in the morning) have now turned to fathomless skies of trustworthy summer hues, cloudless climates and silent breezes and an infinity that never goes dark. She wonders if his feet ever touch the ground.

They don’t. Not anymore.

 ❖

**the ashes**

A light bulb, bright white the way broken glass was in the desert, swung imminently above his achy, blur-blanketed eyes, swiveling around his smashed-up form. He could feel the absolute, bare filaments of his broken bones reaching toward each other, prickling and stitching themselves together only to be knocked apart again, and he wanted to scream, but his body wouldn’t permit him so much, nor would his dignity.

The edges of the man’s laugh were so disgustingly _like_ Artemis’s, husky and deliberate and attentive like hail, but there was something he did not possess that she did – an inherent, ever-present _need_ to laugh, a thundering undercurrent of devotion to hazy happiness, and Wally wondered if the man envied her for knowing what joy was.

“You gonna…” he rasped – his dirt-muddled blood was crusted unpleasantly in the creases and corners of his lips. “Tell me why I was… invited to this little p-party of yours, Sporty?”

Sportsmaster wiped his golf club clean and kicked Wally over onto his side with the toe of his boot. He snickered, and it cut apart the darkness, the dank.

“Oh, because she likes you,” he replied evenly. “Had to make sure you were worth it.”

“Hope I’m – impressing you,” Wally cracked out with a cunning smirk. He couldn’t feel his legs anymore, but he could move them, in feeble, slipping kicks, attempting to right himself with no success.

“Not a bit,” Sportsmaster sneered. “Brace yourself, Kid. We might be hanging out for a while to come.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” Wally croaked with a jutting chin as Sportsmaster lifted him up by the hair and threw him across the room. His elbow cracked against the concrete and he realized that Artemis would not be coming around the corner with a makeshift sling – that the frayed green cloth, muddied and musty-smelling, was probably still crumpled under his bed: untouched.

❖

**all in pieces**

The Cave is quiet for days. So, so quiet.

Artemis sometimes hears trace murmurs of conversation between Wally and the others, or feels his thoughts crawling with stale aimlessness past her own, and she tries to keep the sour taste of jealousy and confusion underneath her tongue when he talks to everyone but her.

She hates that mind link sometimes, because there is nothing worse than feeling the inscrutable existence of Wally at all times of the day and night, even when her room in Gotham stinks of rain and mold and the link does not have the decency to fade with distance (the exercise linked their minds so harshly, so irrevocably, that she’s not sure she can ever get away). She remembers when the boy’s thoughts had been of floating cheeseburgers and pin-up girls and bits of summertime he’d kept in a jar, and in some ways, she misses the obnoxious humming of “Livin’ On a Prayer” in the corner of her head when she’s trying to get to sleep – she misses the staticky, fading snippets of his food-related bemoaning keeping her up until she mentally yells at him.

Now it’s quiet. Wally’s mind is a vast black expanse of No Signal, and Artemis, no matter how hard she tries, can’t change the channel.

The conversation that they need to have scrapes against the back of her teeth, day in and day out, whenever she passes his form in the Cave, but she stays silent, waiting. Wally is going to initiate it sooner or later, she knows, because all he ever _does_ is initiate conversations, especially if they primarily concern himself. And maybe she’s just a little bit scared to approach him and grab him by the shirt and shake the answers out of him, because what if his expression never changes?

So she waits. She cuts an apple for herself, strides slowly past his back – curled around his knees on the couch in front of the switched-off television – and goes into her room to stare at the ceiling stilly as the apple slices turn a malleable, unappetizing brown around the edges.

She spends her nights at the Cave for now. Batman told her she can’t go home, for her own safety.

“That’s okay,” she whispered with a tearful bark of raw laughter. “I’ve got more than one home.”

❖

**don’t cry.**

Wally is in the infirmary overnight, and he doesn’t move once. Artemis sleeps in the uncomfortable chair with her hair disheveled and untied, with her shoulders shivering in the artificial air, with her teeth driving into her lower lip until it bleeds a little. She has the mad, dizzying want to hold his hand, but she’s certain that it will burn her if she tries and that white blisters will dot her fingers for years and years to come.

The dawn rakes up the walls and she wakes up without hesitation, and there is a red spot on her awkwardly raised knee from where her cheek had rested. Her collarbone twinges and cracks as she straightens.

Wally mumbles something and stirs, and by the time he opens his eyes, she’s already halfway down the hall.

❖

**let go.**

Wally bleeds.

His fingers twitch uselessly at the end of his bent arm while he lies spread-eagled on the damp concrete. His right eye is swollen shut and thumping. His throat is hard, and there are purple and white bursts of pain blossoming up through his elbows and chest and hips and ribs and knees. And he bleeds.

Sportsmaster’s footsteps fall away in muffled thuds, and the rusty metal door closes somewhere in the far edges of his field of hearing. No noise can reach his left ear.

He coughs, and something splatters onto his chin. His tongue tastes iron and spoiled water and algae and dirt. Brown and crusty things are under his fingernails, caked across the tips of his fingers. And he hurts. And he bleeds.

But it’s okay, he thinks. They’ll come. Any minute now. Any minute now, he thinks as he closes his eyes – any minute now she’ll kick down the door and fire at Sportsmaster until he’s more arrow than flesh.

Wally grins. There are red lines between his teeth, and his fingers spread as if reaching for something and there is blackness as he bleeds. Maybe he can treat her to milkshakes afterwards. She’s tipping, though.

❖

**your heart breaks like a wheel.**

He hears a crash and it jostles him awake. Sportsmaster had been holding him up by the hair again (and it had _hurt_ , but the pain was so insignificant compared to the throbbing of his bones and his muscles and the scattered, red-edged cuts on his skin that it felt like nothing at all) but when the noise erupts, Wally is dropped to the floor again in a crumpled heap, not bothering to attempt to right himself.

He half-expects her to show up at his side with her face all bruised from the vicious fight she likely went through to find him, and everyone else will be there, too, but she’ll be closest, barking orders and picking him up and muttering bitterly at him for getting himself hurt, and there will be a lackluster glistening in her eyes that he’s only seen once, when she had glowered at the floor after the training exercise. He’ll gloat to himself for eliciting such an expression, but he’ll deserve a little pat on the back after all he’s been through. A pat on the back, and a cheeseburger on her dime.

A ruckus occurs in the room, maybe a few yards to his left, and then there is a crack of bone and a thud of body against floor and quiet for the briefest of moments.

Then – two hands cupping his head, pulling it into a lap. Whispers. Rasps. Wally dares to open his eyes, preparing a lopsided smirk for the archer who is undoubtedly cradling him, but instead it’s M’gann – her dark tears are dropping like rainfall onto his dust-laden face.

He frowns and looks wearily around – Robin is beside him, mouth hard; Kaldur, Superboy, each looking equally ashen, equally exhausted.

There is no one else. The gap between Superboy and Kaldur showcases a feebly-lit, grimy corner, and the light bulb swings, shifting the shadows like bits of fabric.

“Where’s Artemis?” Wally hears himself ask, and no one answers as Kaldur and Superboy gingerly lift him up and begin to carry him out.

“Wh—Where’s Artemis? Where’s Artemis?” he asks again, his voice slurred and mumbling and hardly distinguishable from his scattered groans of pain. He doesn’t stop asking: not for the entire walk back to the bioship – not even when he sleeps, sedated, in a makeshift cot at the back of the ship for the flight back to the Mountain – not even as M’gann starts to cry so hard and so unrelentingly that Kaldur has to pilot the ship in her place.

❖

**so look up (up ahead)**

Wally stares at walls and ceilings and floors and clouds and stars and dirt and grass and generally everything but her.

His lips never move. Quiet. Silence. The occasional languid blink, a trailing vestige of a sigh. Artemis’s fingers curl. Her tongue twists. Her hands are bone-etched fists. She wants to hit something. To hit _him_. He isn’t looking at her. He _never_ looks at her. She’ll be the only other person in the room and he won’t even act like she’s there.

She remembers being angry with her mother when she was a child, refusing to speak for hours. But Wally’s hours stretch into days, and suddenly a week has gone by since they brought him back. Artemis’s back is sore – stiff – rigid and sharply hewn. She hates it. Hates _him_. Hates this feeling, this clawing in her gut, this dried-up clenching in her throat, this need to look at a mirror to make sure she’s still there. That _he’s_ still there. And maybe he isn’t. Maybe they only brought back a part of him.

He should be talking. He should be yammering. Babbling. Practically teething on his own sense of self-importance. But he isn’t. He’s pale and drawn and he won’t look at her.

Idiot. Moron. Jerk. Creep. Dirtbag. Dimwit. _Bastard_.

She punches walls. Punches a lamp. Wants to shout. To scratch. But stays – always – still. And waits. Waits for him to grow up and get the guts to treat her like she’s real.

And waits.

❖

**tell me something real**

It doesn’t take long for Artemis to find him. He’s in the kitchen, but there are no traces of food on the table in front of him, nothing to suggest that he has eaten or plans to. His right arm, encased in a white plaster cast not so different from the one it had sported just a few months ago, props up his chin as he gazes intently at the marble patterns on the countertop, his eyelids lowered. His filtering orange eyelashes sift through the light like dissonant embers.

Artemis doesn’t speak to him. She stands in the doorway, hands clenched at her sides until she is certain her knuckles will rip up through her tightly drawn skin, and watches him. She stares directly at the side of his head, holding her tongue between her teeth, behind her thin, closed lips. He has to know she’s there, she thinks. He has to _realize_.

She has been waiting eight days for him to turn his despicable head and catch her eye, for him to drop the sniveling front and readopt his boorishly jocular nature, but he has done her no such favors and looks as if he will continue to avoid it.

Artemis feels sick. His face is so _devoid_ , so uncharacteristically somber, and the crippling absence of his often-copious words is crawling up the walls and over all surfaces, twisting in black vines over her limbs.

She stares at him for a little over fifteen minutes before it – all of it, all of the quiet and the rib-picking and the emptiness and the hunger and the bewilderment – crashes up her throat from her stomach and explodes with startling volume out into the kitchen.

“Why won’t you talk to me?!” she demands so harshly and so sharply that it rings against the silver pans over the stove.

Wally, at first, doesn’t seem to have heard her. After a moment’s crumbling pause, he blinks slowly and turns his head slightly toward her, focusing on the refrigerator to her left.

“What?” he replies, and the limp little quality of the word is like a stinging slice to the face.

“You _heard_ me,” Artemis snarls. “Don’t pretend you didn’t.” She swallows – her voice already sounds strained and increasingly wet. “Oh, come on, Wally; don’t do this to me; don’t pull this crap, just – just say _something_.”

Wally exhales. There is a stone forming in Artemis’s throat that she can’t seem to swallow. She’s starting to stammer.

“Y-Y’know, even if it’s just to… tell me to go away, or that you never want to talk to me again, or that I’m a harpy or a—a witch or obnoxious; even if it’s something so – so stupidly _you_ and boring… _say it_.” She can’t stand how adamant her voice sounds on the final syllables. She wants to slice away that adamancy and replace it with indifference, but she can’t.

“I need to hear you say _something_ ,” she snaps. “Come _on_ , come on…”

Wally considers her for a great deal of time, maybe even a couple of minutes, before he inhales and straightens his shoulders, shifting his elbows onto his knees and prodding at the prongs of the stool with his sneaker.

“Didn’t think it was _that_ big a deal—”

“You _didn’t th_ —” Artemis may as well be choking on the words Wally is flicking at her, and her rage is back now, weaving up between her ribs and curdling her heart. “You haven’t said _anything_ to me since we saved you; you haven’t even _looked_ at me.”

“We?” Wally asks sharply.

Artemis stiffens.

“Yeah,” she whispers hoarsely. “ _We_.”

Wally then astonishes her by letting out several ripping cracks of laughter, and the rigid corners of what could be considered a smile twitch jaggedly over his face. No other inch of it accommodates the expression – his eyes stay dull, distant. Artemis swallows.

“What’s all this _we_ stuff, Artemis?” he demands. “Because, I mean, maybe I’m crazy, but… I _distinctly_ remember not seeing your ugly mug when everyone showed up to bust me out.”

Artemis bristles at the rancid undertone of his words, trying to ignore the sudden sharp pain on her cheek as if she has been punched. Her voice turns to a dribbling bitterness as she ekes it out of herself like tar.

“ _Shut_ up,” she hisses. “Look at yourself. I-I can’t _stand_ seeing you like this; it makes me _sick_ – I mean, you’re… you’re the _Wall_ -man, right?” She says the nickname with such shaky, cynical admiration that she thinks it makes him flinch. “You’re just supposed to… to plow right on past this and keep joking and flirting with everything that moves and being a total idiot, and just… forget about it, right? I mean, _that’s how you roll_. This kind of stuff has never bothered you before.”

“It was different,” Wally murmurs.

“Different? _Different_?” Artemis repeats, her shoulders cold and quivering. “You know, Wally, you’re a _joke_. He had you for, what, six hours?”

She scoffs, feeling the acrimonious curl of a furiously resentful smile on her face.

“That’s nothing,” she whispers, remembering the days and days that her father would lock her up in that basement and throw in “assignments” for her to take care of; living, breathing assignments with bloody noses and broken bones; remembering the sound of her pathetic crying against the grungy walls when he would punish her for her mistakes, for _letting them get away_.

Wally stiffens. She shakes her head.

“That’s _nothing_ ,” she reiterates. “You – you got off _so_ easy. You’re… you’re really gonna let _six_ puny little hours turn you into… into _this_?”

She gestures to his curled form, his deadpan face, and feels disgusted.

“That’s nothing,” she repeats softly. “You’re _pathetic_.”

“I’m what?” Wally mutters after a time, scooting the stool back and standing up, resting his hands on the counter. “I’m pathetic? _I’m_ pathetic.”

There’s that laugh again – the one that makes her want to punch a hole in his chin.

“Artemis, you…” He gulps something down, chewing his lip. “You wanna know something?”

She says nothing.

“I… was lying on that floor for six hours, yeah. And you know, he… Well, I gotta give the guy credit for being the most _imaginative_ torturer I’ve ever had the pleasure to spend a while with. He used _everything_ on me – javelins, tazers, brass knuckles, _a golf club_ … do you know how many hits to the face I took from his golf club? Seven.”

She winces.

“And I would’ve fought back. Oh, man, I _totally_ would’ve. Except he had one of the inhibitor collars from Belle Reve. Took away my super speed, but… haha. He modified it. Kept it from dampening my accelerated healing, because he _really_ loved the idea that he could beat me up and break my bones as many times as he wanted and I’d still mend myself up, ready to take it all over again, maybe somewhere different this time, maybe in some _new way_.” Artemis is going to vomit; she’s certain of it. “Hey, Artemis, lemme ask you a question! Do you have _any_ idea what it feels like – having your body be… _brutally_ injured, and trying to put itself all back together again? D’you know why they knock you out when they reset your broken bones? I don’t get that luxury. If I lost a leg, my body would be trying to make me a new one for the _rest of my life_.”

“Stop,” Artemis whispers, but he hardly hears her.

“Nobody ever thinks about that part of the accelerated healing gig. It’s not just _magic_. Everything has to just smash itself back together exactly the way it was before, and you can’t just turn it on or off; it’s _happening_ , constantly, and—” He stops himself, halts, closes his eyes.

“You know something? I…” He curls his hands into fists and drives them into the counter, bowing his head. “I took everything he threw at me. I took all of it with this… big, stupid grin, and I kept making him mad on purpose, just to see him lose it. And he’d break my bones _over_ and _over_ again because he wanted me to just shut my mouth, but you know me! Shutting my mouth is _not_ an option.” He swallows. “And of course my body’s trying to heal itself and I can’t feel _anything_ anymore, not even when he punches me in the jaw with the brass knuckles on, but… I didn’t mind.”

His speech is escalating in pace now, blurring into an angry, unforgiving tidal wave, and he starts pacing, gesticulating.

“I kept telling myself that, uh… that you’d show up. You know what I said to him, Artemis? I said, ‘You just wait until they get here; just wait until _Artemis_ gets here; she’s gonna drive you into the _ground_.’ But _you never came_!”

He shouts the last bit, freezing in his tracks. Agonizingly, he lifts his head, and his eyes meet hers, and she suddenly wants to look away and never have to see them again, because they are so pale and glittering with an indecipherable emotion and there are leaping, tumultuous things contained in them – all directed at her.

He quiets his voice, breathing starting to slow.

“You never came,” he whispers again, and Artemis, seemingly of her body’s own accord, turns away and leaves.

❖

**that dirty compromise**

Artemis had put on her uniform from the moment it looked like Wally had been taken and hadn’t removed it since. Her quiver was heavy on her back, laden with more arrows than she would ever use, and she had been sitting in the mission room, polishing her bow, for the past five and a half hours, her eyes dull and distant, her cheeks ashen.

When Batman finally walked in, finally had information, she was the first to stand, waiting vigilantly before the rest of the Team even came running into the room and began clustering dutifully in front of Batman. Robin looked as if he would be sick at any moment. Batman didn’t look much different, but any emotion he may have been feeling was masked by the cowl, by the bone-hard line of his mouth as he began to speak.

“We’ve pinpointed Kid Flash’s location.” Robin’s shoulders sagged in relief or sheer terror or something between the two, and M’gann made a small choking noise. “He’s being held in the basement of an old apartment building in the slums of Gotham City by – by who we believe to be Sportsmaster.”

Artemis didn’t flinch. _She’d had a feeling._

“Tracking information and directions have been sent to all of your communication devices. You deploy immediately.”

All of them nodded wordlessly and turned to run out the door toward the hangar, and Artemis began to follow them. They didn’t get far before Batman spoke again.

“Artemis will _not_ accompany you.”

They all froze, Artemis having shoved her way to the front of the group. She turned slowly toward Batman, and her previously empty eyes were now alight with imminence.

“Excuse me?” she growled. Robin stepped toward her as if to place a hand on her shoulder and faltered.

Batman sighed.

“You will stay here while the rest of the Team retrieves Kid Flash and takes down Sportsmaster.” He fixed her with a harsh, adamant glower. “You’re absolutely forbidden from going anywhere near that building.”

“Why?!” Artemis demanded, her chest a burbling mess.

“We – the League believes that Sportsmaster’s kidnapping of Kid Flash is simply a ploy to lure you to him so that he can… _secure_ you again.” Artemis winced that time, remembering the months earlier that he had dragged her away from a fight by her hair. “We are not prepared to let that happen, and I’m sure your Team isn’t, either. So you _stay put_.”

His expression made no room for argument. Artemis’s fists were clenched so tightly that they shook.

“And what if I don’t care what Sportsmaster does to me?!” she shrieked. “What if I just go whether you say I can or can’t?! You think you’re going to stop me?”

“Artemis…” Robin whispered. She ignored him.

“I go where I want,” she hissed. “This isn’t just a teammate. _This is Wally_! I’m not just going to _sit here—_ ”

“Exactly,” Batman said. “This _isn’t_ just a teammate. This is… Wally. And that’s why you are staying here under Black Canary’s supervision.”

Black Canary, out of nowhere, stepped forward. Artemis didn’t remember her entering the room, but she paid no mind to memory as she stepped backward, toward the already hesitantly departing Team.

“Artemis, come on into the living room,” Black Canary said calmly, extending a hand. “Just sit down. They won’t be long.”

“Don’t touch me!” Artemis screamed, leaping back. “You don’t know how this feels! I can’t just _sit_ and _let_ things happen, not anymore! Not if it’s W—”

“Artemis!” Black Canary interjected as the archer turned to run after the Team. Batman promptly grabbed her and held her forcibly back, but she flailed and kicked, her visage aflame with rage. Despite her struggles, Batman carried her into the living room with Black Canary following.

“Let me go! _Let me go_!” she shouted. “I’ll kill him! _I can kill him_! I can make sure he _never_ bothers us again; I can break him _apart_ —”

“That’s not your call,” Batman barked as he dropped her onto the couch. She glared up at him.

“Whose is it, then?!” she snapped.

“Your Team’s,” Batman growled. “Now stay put. Go wait in the infirmary if you have to. They’ll be back within an hour.”

Artemis, left with little choice, stood and strode toward the infirmary. Black Canary let out a ragged sigh before jogging after her.

❖

**you are a phoenix**

Barry intervenes.

In retrospect, Wally supposes that he shouldn’t be surprised. The Keystone High School track is tinted a shades of lavender and yellow as the sun begins to feebly rise over the winter-laden mountains, and his breath streams out in front of him in dissipating waves, and he forces himself to run like an ordinary person: putting one foot in front of the other, one, two, one, two, breath, breath, eyes on the ground, going slowly. His red sweatshirt is bold against the snowy oak as he runs past it, lips chapped and fingertips prickling with imminent numbness. His earbuds feel hard and obtrusive, and he knows that this is the part where he should be listening to the loud and pulsing comfort of Phoenix, but instead there is Death Cab for Cutie in his ears as he runs behind the approaching morning, disoriented by the fog of his own breathing.

_And all you see is where else you could be when you’re at home._

He hasn’t been able to _run_ in weeks – he hasn’t been able to bring himself to rocket toward the sun; he hasn’t seen any point in dissolving into an unstoppable blur on the frosted hills. The track, the endless and forgiving loop of it, the chance to always start over again, has been his primary haunt each night and dawn, and though he doesn’t remember a single step of it, he does it again and again, content with the routine, the circling, the loss of consciousness to the beat of one’s disgustingly languid feet.

He coughs, and the early morning cold comes up from the ice to encroach his throat. He can smell more snow in the clouds.

He hardly notices when Barry jogs up and falls into step beside him, his blonde hair seeming pale in the morning light.

“Aren’t you cold, Kid?” Barry asks nonchalantly, causing Wally’s eyes to briefly widen and his pace to quicken on instinct. Barry reaches over and plucks the earbuds out, yanking down on the cord until they dangle out of Wally’s sweatshirt pocket, sending out tinny noise into the cold.

“Rhetorical question?” Wally mutters, not blinking or flinching. Barry shrugs.

“Just asking. I mean, your mother couldn’t accompany me this early, so she’s nagging you vicariously through me.”

Wally doesn’t laugh. Barry’s previously lighthearted expression straightens with seriousness.

“Kid, we need to talk,” he says frankly as they round a corner, their footsteps perfectly synchronized.

“We _need_ to, huh?” Wally mumbles snidely, and Barry frowns before halting, putting a hand on the younger speedster’s shoulder with enough firmness to stop him as well.

“Yeah. We do.” He releases Wally, who stuffs the earbuds all the way into the pocket, followed by his hands.

“About what?” Wally inquires breezily, staring off at the tree, jaw clenching from the cold. Barry sighs, putting a hand behind his neck pensively.

“About what happened,” he explains, “with Sportsmaster.”

Wally visibly flinches, his flushed cheeks tightening in something like physical pain. Barry’s conscience fumbles, but he does not relent.

“You’ve barely said a word to anybody for weeks,” he says as if Wally does not already know this. “Batman’s very concerned about you, and don’t even get me _started_ on your mother…”

“What are you, the house representative for any and all nagging now?” Wally demands belligerently, not looking away from the oak. Barry exhales for patience.

“Listen, Wally… let’s go sit on the bleachers.”

After a moment, Wally shrugs and abides, loping over to the nearby metal bleachers, clambering up and up until he has reached the back row. He takes a seat and Barry joins him, grimacing at the frigid feel of the metal.

The sunrise is at its peak, and the snow is red and orange. Wally’s gaze is distant.

Barry lets a moment of silence pass, and there are a great many things he can say, but he settles on:

“I know how it feels.”

Wally lets out a puff of some twisted definition of laughter and shakes his head.

“Yeah?” he replies emptily, sounding miles above skeptical.

“I’d think it was obvious,” Barry grumbles, attempting to keep a large amount of sarcasm out of his voice and largely failing.

Wally gives him an incredulous look.

“Not really.”

Barry breathes out slowly, watching his opaque breath cloud up and drift away into the frost. His chest is tight at the thought of recounting the memory, but the Kid needs it.

“Way back in the day,” he says, “I was nabbed by Professor Zoom.”

Wally’s blood grows as chilled as the landscape around them at the mere mention of the name, but he says nothing.

“He had me for… I dunno. A day or so, maybe a little less. And he was _brutal_. Man, I was a wreck, even with accelerated healing on my side. They had to work on patching me up in the infirmary for three days, practically.” He shudders. “I was bleeding all over the place, and a bunch of my bones were broken. Iris had a fit. Practically wouldn’t let me leave the house for a month.”

He shifts, leaning back on the railing. Wally is watching him carefully, compelled, and there is a vague semblance of a smile on his face at the mention of Iris being flung into a tizzy.

“It was… one of the worst things I’ve ever been through,” he confesses. “I mean, I barely remember any of it, but… I just remember being held up on that wall, thinking, _begging_ that the League would come for me and get me out, but… in the end, they hadn’t even noticed I was gone until about twenty-one hours in. I thought they’d get it when I didn’t show up for monitor duty the night before, but I guess they thought that was a _common occurrence_ or something.”

Wally permits himself a smirk.

“But – I kept telling myself they’d come for me, and that everything would be okay. That I was going to make it through this. _I_ couldn’t do anything because Zoom had totally incapacitated me, but the League could, and they’d come for me. I kept saying that to myself over and over. Just a little longer. Just a little longer, and then they’ll come, and Iris’ll be waiting at home for you.” He sighs, long and weighted. “But… in the end, the one who got me out of there was… well, me. I managed to vibrate so much that it went over the capacity of the machine he had me locked in, and I barely got out of there in one piece; I don’t remember it at all. I just remember waking up with Iris beating me over the head with part of my IV drip.” His expression hardens. “I thought I’d never be the same. I let the whole thing eat me apart for months. It took me a while to unconditionally trust the League the way I used to.”

“I’m sorry,” Wally mumbles, because it’s all he can think of, and he doesn’t say it often, so it must mean something big. Barry laughs through his nose.

“No need, Kid,” he whispers. “I got over it.”

Wally blinks rapidly and glances at Barry, clutching the bleacher seat with viciousness.

“How?” he demands hoarsely. “How do you get over something like—”

“Wally, listen to me.” Barry’s hand is on his shoulder. Wally allows himself to look his uncle in the eye, and swallows. “This is not the Team’s fault. It isn’t Artemis’s fault, and it sure as hell isn’t _your_ fault. It’s Sportsmaster’s.”

“Yeah, you say that,” Wally snaps, roughly shouldering Barry’s hand off. “But it is. It is her fault. She just left me there.”

“She didn’t _leave_ you there,” Barry insists. “You just let yourself think she did.”

“I wouldn’t have made it through that if I hadn’t thought she would come,” Wally growls, and he sounds pathetic and wants to hit himself until he bleeds again. “I was so stupid and helpless; I just laid there and took it and I kept telling myself that they’d come and _get_ me, that _she_ would, because—because I thought she and I… had something. After the _exercise_.” That word is spoken with such unbridled spite that it causes Barry’s eyes to widen. “I thought I could trust her. I thought—I don’t…” He bows his head, and his red hair covers his eyes. “I don’t know what I thought.”

A crow cries out from the trees. Barry sees a feral cat limping by on the other side of the track, alone and scared.

“You did all right, Kid,” Barry says very suddenly, very quietly. These are not words that he throws around all that often. He has always been _tough_ on Wally, because the last thing the kid needs is to think that heroism is easy or that he’s good enough at it to let himself run ahead and make mistakes, and maybe he’s been unfair, but it’s just been to make sure that his nephew doesn’t get so cocky that he winds up dead. Wally, at the sound of the words, straightens up, looking as if he has just been hit in the face with a hammer. “You did all right the whole time because you believed in something greater than the bad guy – something greater than what was happening to you. That’s something you need to always remember: that there’s always something above the bad guys. There’s _always_ something better than them, and usually that something’s you.”

“It shouldn’t have to be,” Wally exclaims. “The first thing you told me was to never let yourself be alone, to always make sure you keep your friends close, because working alone and trying to be self-sufficient is impossible and stupid. I just – I can’t believe they… _she_ didn’t…” His voice breaks and he hunches over, humiliated by the crack.

Barry sighs, scratching his head.

“Man, I always hoped I wouldn’t have to teach you and of this stuff for a while to come,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry this had to happen to you, Wally. I’m sorry you had to go through it. But the truth is, it happens. It happened this time and it’ll happen again and again. That’s… part of the gig.”

“Then maybe this isn’t the gig I’m meant for,” Wally spits out bitterly, “if I can’t _take it_.”

“Hey, I didn’t say that!” Barry shouts. “Now you listen to me, Wally. You listen good and hard. This anger thing, this whole blaming shindig – this isn’t how it works. This is _not_ what you do to cope. Do you understand me? Never be angry. Never let rage get the better of you, because it’ll destroy everything you’ve got if you do. You let yourself get angry and you’ll be blaming the wrong people, and they’ll leave you. And you’ll look back on it years later and wonder what you did wrong, and you’ll never be able to figure it out because you’ll think that getting mad was just a _step_ , but it isn’t.”

“I can’t help being angry, okay?!” Wally yells furiously, digging his fingers into his hair and tugging with painful force. “What else am I supposed to be?! _Happy_?! They didn’t even notice I was gone! _She didn’t even come to help them get me_! What, was she too busy with _target_ practice, or something?!”

“Stop that, Kid,” Barry tells him with such staggering adamance that Wally is driven to silence. “Stop that right now. I get it. You put your hope in Artemis and she let you down. So what? I know it’s hard, Kid, but you have to accept that sometimes the only person you can really put faith in is yourself.”

Wally curls in on himself, resting his chin on his drawn-up knees and gazing out at the glittering frost on the track. The fog was vanishing against the onslaught of the white sun. He says nothing.

Barry waits for a while before adopting a pensive expression, drifting into silence for a few moments. Eventually, he straightens.

“Okay. That does it.” He turns to Wally, brandishing a stern finger. “You need time away from the Team – from the base. From the missions.” Wally’s eyes go wide. “You’re so caught up in feeling hateful right now that you can’t see things the way that really are anymore, and you need to take a break so that when you go back, you won’t be biased by all of this crap you’re feeling.”

“What’re you saying, we take a vacation? Now? I’ve got school!” Wally exclaims.

“Think of it as a… hero sabbatical.” Barry grins, winking. “And I already called ahead to the school. Said you had pneumonia. You’ve got two weeks’ leave. Doctor’s orders.”

“Are you serious?” Wally says weakly.

“We can run anywhere you like, Kid. Anywhere. And we can stay there for as long as you want. And we – you can sort this out. On your own or with my help; whichever you prefer.”

Wally lapses into quiet, debating this. And suddenly, the horribly sick feeling in his stomach at the prospect of returning to the Cave after his run is gone, and the morning seems infinitesimally brighter and more wide, and the thought of sleeping in his unkempt bedroom is not the same nauseating foreboding.

He smiles, weakly. Barry considers it to be one of his greatest personal triumphs.

“Okay,” Wally whispers.

Barry stands. “Where to?”

Wally thinks for a moment.

“Always wanted to see the redwoods,” he says, and gets to his feet.

“Excellent choice,” Barry comments with a wink. “Oh, and can we stop for burgers on the way? I’m starvin’.”

A burger has never sounded better.  **  
**


	2. Part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wally sends her a postcard. "We need to talk," it says. He hopes it will be enough to get things started on the way back to how they used to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to Kory and Annica for inspiring me to get off my butt and finish this.

**here, the night is fine.**

It only takes them about a day and a half to run to California. The landscapes between Happy Harbor and the redwoods whiz by like detached strokes in a painting, fluttering past, suspended in the air. When they finally come to a halt on the outskirts of Point Arena, the first thing Wally realizes is that he can _breathe_. The air is like mist seeping into him, cycling and dissolving through his torso and limbs.

The fog is softer there, more liberated, tumbling down through the trees on the high mountains and spilling through the town as if it holds the buildings up. The ocean is crashing and gray and loud, blown into white-capped chaos by the wind. The bluffs curve out into the sea and the beaches are cold and wide with no horizons, and the calamari and cod and clams are delicious. That’s the most important part, obviously.

He and Uncle Barry see all of it, and not a single question is ever asked; not a phone call is made or received. His cell phone dies two days in. He doesn’t have the charger.

When he leans back to try to look up to the tops of the redwood trees, he nearly loses his balance, and maybe he forgets how to inhale for the briefest of seconds, staring at something so huge and still and silent, stretching up past the clouds and the low-hanging fog until its green needles are almost a part of the sky. At any point in his life prior to this, he might have seen them as boring, but things are more than just a little different now – not enough for him to put his finger on.

A few days before they go back, before Wally’s fingers have become utterly immune to the cold and the cool, he sends a postcard to Artemis at the Cave without thinking, dropping it in the mailbox as if it’s dangerous.

“Visit the redwoods,” it says on the front, a stark yellow font curling over a photograph of the auburn, pine needle-riddled path twisting between the trees. “Mendocino, CA.” Wally’s frank little scribble fills the back, as quick and as breathless as he’d been when he’d written it.

_We need to talk._

_— Wally_

On the way back, he wonders if it’s been lost in the mail. He wonders if she won’t be there when he gets back, and he wonders if he’ll ever know the answer to any question ever again.

His breath hitches. Maybe she’s gone. Maybe she’s gone forever. Maybe he’d care if she was.

—

**(that’s all over now)**

Barry drops him off at the zeta tube near his house, giving him the sort of meaningful look that comes before a battle, and Wally thanks him for everything and hugs him and steps inside the phone booth just as the yellow morning sunlight begins to creep along the asphalt of the street.

There’s a flash, and he feels the familiar sensation of his intestines seeming like they’re being juggled by a clown, and then Barry is gone, and he is standing in the entrance room of the Cave, and it feels like he hasn’t been there for several passing seasons.

It’s empty. It’s quiet. Wally stares at it, utterly still, for several moments, trying to catch his breath and decide whether to walk in or walk away. He straightens his sweatshirt – the crimson fabric sticks to the sweat on his palms – and presses his hair down, heart thudding at the thought of M’gann, wet-eyed and smiling; of Conner, staring crankily at the wall.

He steps forward without considering it and walks toward the kitchen, feeling a twinge of fondness at the thought of black smoke churning out from it. But, as he discovers when he enters, there’s no one there. It’s pristine, the surfaces untouched as if for days. Wally falters.

“Megan?” he calls, much more quietly than he had hoped. “Hey – Meg? Conner? Jeez, _anyone_?”

No answer. Wally gives one last hesitant frown to the kitchen before turning to go—and almost crashes into the form that seems to have suddenly materialized in front of him.

He lets out a startled shout, leaping back to better survey the intruder. He loosens quickly when he registers the face, grinning.

“Rob,” he exclaims with raised eyebrows. Robin, in a gray t-shirt and jeans, is standing in the doorway with his eyes trained on the floor. Wally gives a weak smile that quickly grows into a wider one. “Hey. Hi. Dude, where _is_ everyone? This place is _creepy_ when nobody’s—”

He breaks off when he notices that Robin’s expression hasn’t changed – no welcoming grin, no mischievous smirk, not even a bitter glare. His face is pinched and drawn and largely lifeless.

“Di—” Wally starts to say softly, but Robin raises his chin and he halts, feeling his limbs grow inexplicably heavier.

“Promise me you won’t run,” Robin tells him in a voice that sounds like it’s been ground over searing coals for hours.

Wally’s chest shudders and the back of his neck feels chilled and his throat goes dry, but he nods numbly, not blinking.

Robin’s eyes do not stray from his, their blue tint vague and evasive behind the sunglasses. Wally wishes he would take the stupid things off.

“It’s—” Robin swallows, fingers curling and uncurling. “Wally. It’s – it’s Artemis. We… had a mission… and she…” He isn’t looking at Wally anymore. His voice breaks. “ _She’s_ …”

It’s not the first time that Wally has broken a promise. Without thinking, without waiting, without pausing, he shoves past Robin and runs. He doesn’t notice where he goes, how tired he is, how dark it is. He runs until he can no longer breathe.

—

**the mines of twilight**

Wally only runs on the track at dusk now, when the infinitesimal vestiges of the stars begin to prod their way past the winter mist, halfway to spring, halfway less hard-edged. His parents don’t question him when he leaves the house at the same time every evening without saying anything, and Uncle Barry has yet to appear to whisk him off on another therapeutic expedition – but then again, that was three weeks ago. In some ways, he prefers it like this: alone and unquestioned, his feet thudding down onto the tarmac like stones.

He rounds a corner and, just for a second, he goes just a little bit faster than he usually does, and there is a short red-and-gray blur behind him, but it dissipates without a trace, and he keeps going, not looking back. Sometimes he feels like it doesn’t suit him anymore.

He finishes his sixth lap and slows until he’s come to a stop across from the bleachers, his breath streaming out, thinner now that it’s nearer to spring. He wipes moisture from his forehead with one sleeve and stares at the ground, breathing as evenly as he can to the sound of some Toto song he hasn’t been bothering to listen to. Eventually, he moves toward the bleachers, where he’d set down his water bottle and duffle bag, letting his eyes stray up.

He freezes. His hands spasm out, and his iPod drops, jerking away from the headphone cord and clattering to the ground.

There is a figure seated at the summit of the bleachers, largely obscured by the mist, and it stands when he notices it, slowly stepping down toward him. It’s too small to be Uncle Barry and too tall to be Robin, and he highly doubts that anyone but the two of them knows that he even comes here, save for his parents, who are both at work.

The mist dissolves away as the figure draws closer, and finally, there’s a face. Wally steps back involuntarily, his fingers stiff.

“You know, you could have taken the time to let Robin finish what he was saying,” Artemis says harshly. The collar of her black turtleneck curves around the edges of her chin. Her hands are resting in the pockets of her gray peacoat. Her hair is tied in a bun. And she looks terrible.

“Oh,” Wally hears himself say. “So, you’re _not_ dead.”

“And I thought Robin was the detective,” Artemis mutters, coming to a halt directly facing him, not looking at him. “Maybe if you’d stuck around, you’d have heard him say that I was just _in danger_ of dying. But I made it.”

Wally says nothing. He stares down at the red tarmac, at the fading white lines.

Artemis sighs.

“Why? Disappointed?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Wally snaps instantly, his chin jerking up until he is glaring straight at her. There are lines on her face that he’s sure weren’t there before.

She pushes her loose hair out of her eyes, sighing roughly. She waits a moment to talk.

“I’m guessing you’re still mad?” she mutters, her voice almost rancorous with bitterness.

Wally absentmindedly pulls at his fingers, popping his knuckles. The sound cracks out into the cold, startling a crow into flapping out of a tree.

“I don’t… _think_ so,” he finally answers. “I haven’t decided yet. I mean I haven’t really thought about it much.”

Artemis scoffs quietly. The breath bursts out into a cloud.

“Figures.” She wipes her nose with the back of her hand, sniffing. “So did you have a nice trip?”

Wally shrugs.

“It was fine.”

Artemis doesn’t speak again for a while, and neither does he. The silence fills the several feet between them, pushing against its edges, but somehow, it is not an uncomfortable one. Wally scuffs at the tarmac with his sneaker and Artemis stares at the distant hills with half-interest.

“I would’ve come,” she says suddenly. “If I cou—”

“It’s fine.” Wally hears himself interrupt, and he freezes, astonished. The words had not been thought or planned or contemplated, and if he didn’t know better, he wouldn’t even believe that they are his.

Artemis is still focused intently on the hills, but her shoulders are shaking and her eyes are starting to look red. Wally wishes he didn’t notice.

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to apologize,” she grinds out as if they are the hardest words she has ever said. “Or to… _not_ apologize. And I—”

“Who was it?” Wally asks her quietly. She finally, finally wrenches her gaze away from the scenery and looks him in the eye; her attention is a muffled impact against his stomach, but he wrestles down any visible reaction.

“Who was… what?” she rasps. She stiffens before coughing into her hand, a cutting and raw sound that makes Wally wince.

“Who did… that?” He gestures to her. She frowns for a brief second before loosening in comprehension.

“Uh, my dad,” she answers, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and flicking her eyes to the ground. “I tried to get revenge. Y’know. Standard stupidity. Didn’t quite work out for me.”

“He got away?”

She shakes her head, gaze darkening.

“No,” she whispers, and her tone is heavy with an emotion Wally can’t quite decipher. “League has him in custody. We’ll see how long _that_ lasts.”

“I waited for you.” More words that he hadn’t considered, hadn’t even wanted to say aloud for the rest of his life. He supposes they sound better than the horrendous _You never came, you never came, you never came_ that had been drumming through his temples a week or so before.

Artemis stands unmoving for a moment before pressing a hand over her eyes, digging her fingernails into her forehead. Wally can see little red marks starting to form around them. Her hair is straggly and loose from the hairtie, so different from the typically taut and absolute ponytail he is so used to seeing. She lets out a ragged, wretched noise, screwing her eyes shut, and the hand drops and she turns her head sharply away in profile.

“I know you did,” she croaks. Wally wonders when this happened, when she went from the desperately angry girl who had confronted him in the kitchen to this ashen, limp-shouldered mess.

He breathes out until he can’t anymore, feeling exhausted.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” he finally says. “And I’m sorry I wasn’t there. For you.”

“One for me, one for you,” she jokes emptily. “We’re even.” She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. “But for what it’s worth, I’m glad _you’re_ okay, too.”

“As okay as okay can be,” he assures her with a halfhearted thumbs-up. She smiles wryly, letting out a short breath of laughter through her nose.

“You’re better than he is, you know,” she whispers. “I mean, you’re – too good to let him screw you over; you’re… you’re just better. He’s nothing. You know that, right?”

Her eyes lock into his. He doesn’t blink.

“Right?” she repeats with slightly more volume.

Wally still remembers the feeling of the golf club as it collided with his ribs, his cheek. He remembers the javelins, the baseball bat, the rancid floor and the algae in the corners and the dirt and dank crusted into the walls. He remembers the darkness, the light bulb, the laughter. He remembers closing his eyes and never once doubting that he would make it back in one piece, and he remembers Artemis standing outside the door of his souvenir room with her arms crossed, smiling with caution, as he denied the existence of magic.

“Right,” he says.

There it is again, the careful tilt of the corners of her lips, the vaguely amused sheen to her eyes – or maybe those are the dull tears that only Artemis can let out, gathering on the edges of her eyelids. She opens her mouth and a sentence begins, but he stops her.

“You don’t have to apologize,” he tells her softly. “I understand. I forgive you. I think. No. I forgive—”

“Don’t tell me that unless you’re sure,” Artemis interjects with a solemn expression, the half-smile gone.

“Things happen,” Wally says slowly, pensively. “I don’t need to know what they were; you don’t have to tell me. It doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t even matter if you wanted to come or not. I shouldn’t have put that much faith in you.”

Artemis goes silent. When she talks again, her voice does nothing to conceal her hurt.

“Sorry I let you down,” she chokes out. Wally’s eyes widen and he waves his hands frantically.

“No, no—wow, that sounded awful.” He scrambles to recover the words he isn’t even sure he knows how to say. “What I mean is that I… should’ve put faith in _myself_ , too. Instead of just… waiting.” He sighs, running his fingers through his hair; it sticks up in retaliation. “I mean, I shouldn’t have put that much – weight on you. Because look at what happened. In a good way! What I’m trying to say is that it was wrong to _expect_ you, you know?”

“Wally, I’m _sorry_!” Artemis shouts very suddenly, frightening four or so turtledoves off of the snowy ground beyond the chain-link fence bordering the track. “I’m sorry; _I’m sorry_!”

Wally strides forward before he can stop himself, snaking both of his arms around her in an instant and pulling her against his chest, clutching the back of her head with one hand. She doesn’t draw away, clenching his sweatshirt in her quaking fists. It is fully dark now, fully night, and his breath streams out unimpeded in clouds. The moon wanes a crescent behind the feeble mist, surrounded by the stars, and the streetlights down in town start to flicker on.

“Let’s both be sorry,” he suggests, and his voice is much more hoarse than he had intended it to be. “Fair enough, right?”

“You really shouldn’t have to be,” Artemis mumbles, her tear-strained voice muffled against his clothes.

Wally exhales into her hair, clenching her more tightly, and she reciprocates, her arms wrapped unrelentingly around his torso.

“Then neither should you,” he tells her frankly, and that is the solution, suddenly and unequivocally: that is all that he has pondered saying since he came back from California, since he sprinted alone and afraid out of the Cave five days ago.

The turtledoves have come back, cooing melancholically from the trees, and Wally closes his eyes to the sound.

—

**(the morning doesn’t even scare you)**

The night that they all awoke from the exercise, Wally had spent half an hour in the bathroom doubled over and retching, his eyes and throat stinging, his skin clammy and cold. No one had knocked on the door. No one had asked him to hurry up. The space beyond the white tiled walls had been silent to an almost crippling degree, as devoid of being or breath as his mind since M’gann had forcibly shut herself away from everyone, barely salvaging what was left of their telepathic link. The visions of red, of people burning, of the tundra and Artemis’s dissolving bones, were rotting behind his closed eyelids and he could do nothing to eradicate them; he had vomited, curled up and on his knees, until he was so hungry he could hardly breathe.

Zeta tubes offline, Red Tornado had informed them with as much regret as an android could possess. Routine repairs and updates. Will not be functional again until tomorrow evening. The six of them had been in the living room; Artemis, slumped against the wall with her forehead on her raised knees; M’gann, perched precariously on the edge of the armchair; Kaldur, arms folded and head bowed; Robin, his head in his hands, his sunglasses thrown onto the floor; Conner, hovering anxiously behind M’gann; and Wally, seated on the couch beside Robin with his arms resting on his legs as he stared blankly at a spot of dirt on the coffee table.

They had all gone to bed without speaking. They had not said a word to each other since they had woken up, and none of them planned to. Wally, still breathless, still sick, had retreated into his bedroom and left the door wide open as he changed and slipped beneath the blankets, not bothering to turn out the light.

Sometime during the night, he had jerked awake and his t-shirt had been stuck to his skin by tepid sweat, and he had wheezed into his palms as he sat up and failed to forget watching her die.

When had it begun to matter? When had it suddenly been so unimaginable, so terrifying, that he could no longer breathe properly? When had the thought of Artemis, erased completely from the world, falling gracefully backwards as she dissolved before his eyes, rendered him incapable of feeling anything but _scared_?

He had climbed out of bed and strode three doors down the hallway without even registering what he was doing, half-sleepwalking, half-certain, before coming to a halt at Artemis’s bare, dull door.

“Artemis,” he had murmured, resting his forehead against the wood. “Artemis.”

A shuffle. A sigh. The door had opened and he had infinitesimally pitched forward without the support for his head, but had righted himself before she could notice. She had been dressed in a tee-shirt at least four sizes too big for her, cadet blue, and he had no idea where she’d gotten it from, but she had been wearing little else. He hadn’t even had the good sense to turn red.

She had stared up at him with the falsest expression of confusion he had ever seen, and her unbound hair had twisted down her shoulders, damp from a shower.

“Artemis,” he had said again, quietly, disbelievingly. She had moved aside after a moment to allow him in and he had stepped over the threshold into her dimly lit room. She had closed the door behind her and turned to him, seeming so small against the bare walls, minimally illuminated by the vague gold light from her bedside lamp.

“I keep having nightmares,” she had told him. “But they aren’t about anything. They’re all nothing.”

“You’re alive,” he had whispered. “You’re – alive.”

“I guess I am.” She had brushed past him and clambered into the bed, pulling the sheets up under her shoulders, her hair fanning out over the pillow. “So are you.”

“This is crazy,” he had said weakly, following her into the bed without thought and stretching out beside her, tugging at the blankets. “God. This is…”

Artemis had reached over and turned out the light, and Wally had vaguely registered himself slinging one arm over her waist before he had fallen, mercifully, asleep, and neither of them had woken until noon, never speaking of it again, both largely certain that it had been a dream.

It had to have been a dream.

**—**

**dream in peaceful blue**

Wally doesn’t understand why his mother lacks any vague semblance of a surprised reaction when he returns home with Artemis straggling behind him. On the contrary, when he walks through the front door and Artemis hesitantly follows him inside, Mary West appears from the kitchen with a towel in one hand and a plate in the other and hardly looks at Artemis for a second before smiling warmly, asking Wally what the occasion is.

He tells her the truth: That it is far too late for Artemis to go back to Gotham by herself; that the trip, even by zeta beam, is an unnecessarily trying one to take in the cold night; that if he hadn’t brought her with him, she would have had to spend the night at the homeless shelter like the bum she is.

Artemis elbows him. It feels… nice. Like old times. It barely even hurts.

Mary goes straight to work at sprucing up the guest bedroom for Artemis, whom Wally has never seen look so flustered or humble, and Rudolph emerges from the den as though he had been call for by the president, and Wally starts to regret his own hospitality the moment Mary brings out some of his old Flash pajamas for Artemis to sleep in.

“I can just sleep in my clothes,” Artemis splutters, gesticulating helplessly. Mary scoffs.

“Oh, nonsense.” She shoves the pajamas into Artemis’s arms, nodding in satisfaction. “Just take them, honey. They may be Wally’s, but at least they smell decent.”

“ _Mom_ ,” Wally growls through gritted teeth as Mary ushers Artemis into the guest bedroom. Rudolph stays behind, hands in his pockets, and he and Wally both watch the women disappear down the hallway.

“Did you guys work it out?” he asks nonchalantly. Wally softens.

“I hope so,” he mutters before heading down the hall in the opposite direction toward his bedroom. “G’night, Dad.”

“Night, sport.”

He assumes that Artemis has sufficiently settled, because Mary comes in to bid him good night and turn his light off, and it goes dark in the kitchen, and he closes his eyes, rolling over. The bulb of the street lamp outside is in need of repair, a filmy yellow light flickering on his floor.

The moment he starts to dream, it is of throbbing pain in all of his limbs, of the smell of dirt and grime and the sight of a glinting hockey mask with flecks of his blood on it, and he gasps and wakes up with a spasm and a shudder, his eyes flying open as he jolts forward, panting into the quiet.

He turns his shaking head to glance at the clock. 2:37 AM.

He presses the balls of his hands against his eyes until it gives him a headache, until he sees spots and splotches, gritting his teeth with viciousness.

At the end of his tether, he throws the sheets off of himself and stumbles out of his room into the hallway, making his way haphazardly to the kitchen in search of a glass of water.

He halts in the entryway. Artemis is standing over the sink, her palms flattened on the counter on either side of it, her head bowed, her hair wild, as it had been so many months ago. His pajamas are far too large on her, baggy and loose

“Nightmare?” he rasps, rubbing at his raw-feeling eyes. She gives a start, whirling around to face him. She loosens after a second, brushing her hair out of her face.

“Uh – yeah,” she replies tersely. Her breathing is uneven. “Just – remembering the…” Her voice trails off, but Wally knows what she is remembering, and suddenly, the thought of Sportsmaster doing to her what he did to him makes him feel more ill than his own memories.

“Me too,” he ekes out, nodding wearily. “Same cause, probably.”

Artemis puts both of her hands on her face and runs them slowly down over it, stopping at her cheeks.

“We’re so messed up.” Her voice cracks. “I just want to sleep.”

Wally grasps her wrist and leads her out of the kitchen, down the hallway and into the guest room. The eggshell-white covers of the bed are rumpled, the pillows askew, the blinds closed.

He releases her and nods toward the bed, and she, after a moment, follows his gesture, climbing cautiously in and lying down, turning away from him.

“Thanks for the support,” she mutters, putting one hand on the pillow. Wally lingers hesitantly beside the bed before shrugging and turning to go.

“I’ll be down the hall if you…” he starts to say, but she cuts him off without rolling over, without even moving.

“Or you can just stay here,” she grunts. “For convenience’s sake. Why should I have to walk down an entire hallway?”

Wally frowns at her.

“Artemis, we said that we wouldn’t—”

“I know what we said,” she snaps. “But that time, we’d both just died. I think that warrants a ‘Not Wanting to Deal With It’ excuse.” She sighs. Wally, on the other hand, holds his breath. “Look, if we’re both having nightmares, we might as well have them next to each other, right?”

She’s talking about it with such forced detachment and vague annoyance that Wally wouldn’t be surprised if she’s talking about something that causes her a massive inconvenience, or about a movie she hates or a book whose ending had always bothered her. He remembers the warmth of her within his arms after the exercise, the steady rise and fall of her against his chest, and he remembers the startling ability to sleep the way he hadn’t been able to in years, uninterrupted, content.

The floor heater hums, filling the quiet with its barely noticeable rattle. Wally’s feet carry him forward and suddenly he is beside her, and the sheets are draped over his shoulders, and she rolls over and tucks her head under his chin and he can feel her breaths gathering against his neck. Even in the pitch-blackness, he can distinguish the edge of her form, and he shifts until his arms are around her, holding her against him, and neither of them says anything for a long time. The grandfather clock in the living room chimes three times at one point, and then she speaks, the words warm on his skin.

“Are you still awake?” she mutters.

He nods. His chin brushes against the top of her head.

“Batman wouldn’t let me go,” she whispers frantically, pushing her forehead against his collarbone. “He said it was probably a trap. I had to sit there and wait, and even when they brought you back, I couldn’t go in. Batman had to have Kaldur tell me everything that happened.” Her voice lowers. “I knew Dad was the one who took you. I would’ve ripped him _apart_. I would’ve broken him up into _pieces_ —”

"Listen to me, Artemis," Wally says into her ear, his breath skirting over it. "It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to me. I forgive you. I understand."

She goes quiet. Her fingers uncurl and spread out over his chest.

“Uncle Barry told me,” Wally interjects softly after a moment, “that sometimes the only person I can put faith in is… me. And I believed him. But I thought that meant I’m always going to end up alone.”

Artemis is murmuring, over and over, _I’m going to rip him apart_ ; Wally rubs her back repetitively, and she comes even closer to him, closer than he ever thought she could be.

“It doesn’t, though,” he continues quietly. “It just means that I have to… I have to trust myself to never _let_ myself be alone.” He frowns. “I _think_.” He shakes his head pensively after a moment. “Too much deep thinking for one night.”

“Just stay,” Artemis whispers, and it is the barest Wally has ever heard her voice, so wispy and imploring; the words rest on him, sinking into his skin, and he curls forward, his palms loosening, his eyes closing.

He sleeps soundly and without waking; Artemis doesn’t move from his grasp, her weight leaving his arm numb and useless in the morning, and his mind is a wide blank space that engulfs him like an ocean – never has it felt so nice, in all his life, to think of nothing at all.

He recovers. She recovers. He sleeps, she sleeps; he wakes, she wakes; he breathes, she breathes, and soon he is running again, a blur heading for the horizon, always turning back, always slowing himself down, to fall asleep beside the girl with the ashes in her all-discerning eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve been so afraid to write the conclusion to this. I’ve been torturing myself over it for months. Honestly, part one flowed so well for me and I was so pleased with it that I was afraid of ever touching it again, afraid of ruining what I had built in part one with an unsatisfying finish.  
> More than I’ve been afraid of disappointing myself, I’ve been afraid of disappointing my readers. You.  
> I hope I haven’t.

**Author's Note:**

> This is really my first serious into the realm of angst (though that Artemis/Zatanna story was certainly creeping into this territory, but with more crazy), so I'm not quite sure how it is, but I'm hoping it's all right. Originally it was going to be a oneshot, but the story got so big that a two-shot will have to do. I'd always wanted to explore the idea of loss of trust, not so much in the YOU LIED TO ME sense, but in the I THOUGHT YOU'D BE THERE FOR ME AND YOU WEREN'T sense.


End file.
